I am not sure why, but have started writing out last lectures for my “US as a Global Power” class. It makes me feel like a mid-twentieth century professor: cue pipe (and penis). The course is challenging, exciting and also painful for me as well as for my students. Writing out a last lecture is my attempt to synthesize where we have been over the past few months and what that might mean. Also, it’s kind of a love letter to my students, for their hard work and patience over the course of a long and difficult semester contemplating the workings and wreckage of American empire.

Good morning. And, as I should have said before, maybe every single day before we started class: we stand at this moment on the historic lands of the Menominee, Miami and Potawatomie nations, who remain sovereign and present in Milwaukee today. The existence of the University of Wisconsin, one of the great American land grant institutions advancing research and public education, is dependent on a system of settler-colonialism, in which the state amasses lands and resources, and in the process, dispossesses indigenous inhabitants. That is the ground we stand on at this moment.

This interpretation has been overshadowed in our national political life by American exceptionalism: the idea that the United States conveys democracy and progress around the world, and, therefore, is unlike any imperial power of the past. You can see the university as an emblem of progress and enlightenment; or you can contextualize that progress and enlightenment in light of dispossession and loss and start from there.

Because of the dominance of American exceptionalism, I have felt it necessary in this class to emphasize practices of empire, from the colonial period on, and to trace the ways that these practices are entangled not only with the emergence of the United States as a global power –the operative title of this course – but with the very existence of the nation itself.

This class, then, is in many ways a long intervention against the history and historiography of American exceptionalism. In one semester, you as students were asked to challenge your longstanding understanding of our national past. Many of you have testified to your surprise and pain over the course of the semester as we examined this history.

Over the course of this class, we have talked about the development of an American empire, starting with Thomas Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty” in what became the continental United States over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries. Built largely through the labor of enslaved Africans and exploited migrants from Europe and the Americas, this empire required dispossession of the indigenous inhabitants in this land. An ideology of Manifest Destiny justified expansion West as well as the confiscation of a healthy chunk of Mexico at the close of the Mexican-American War in 1848.

Overseas expansion followed the “closing of the frontier” in 1892 and the military defeat of united Indian nations in the West. Starting with the Spanish American war, the United States began to acquire territories beyond our continental boundaries: Hawai’i, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Philippines.

The constitution sort of followed the flag. But the new territories were legally marked as separate from the nation. Often viewed as racially distinct, their denizens were accorded differential access to democratic self-government and the full rights and protections of American citizenship.

Practices of empire overseas were shaped by domestic ideas of gender and race, which governed everything from ideas of the appropriate attire for Hawai’ian hula dancers, to the civilizing burden carried by missionaries, to labor practices in the new territories, to the capability of people newly ruled by the stars and stripes to emigrate to the imperial center and become full citizens. In turn, the conduct of overseas empire shaped domestic governance, requiring tax dollars, surveillance infrastructure, immigration enforcement, and frequent military mobilizations, among other things.

Around this time in the course, we encountered the great American political theorist, W.E.B. DuBois. You’ll remember his line, “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” Many of you quoted his essay on WWI, “The African Roots of War,” on the first take-home exam. In his writing as well as his political work founding the Pan African Congress in 1900, DuBois recognized a Black and anti-colonial internationalism often at odds with American empire. DuBois and his allies recognized the mutually reinforcing connections between domestic racism and imperialism. They created global networks to counter imperialism and work for racial justice.

In addition to territorial expansion, American empire operated economically. Learning from the banana, we looked at the rise of United Fruit as a political, military, and tourist power in the western hemisphere. This took place during the period between the two world wars, often referred to as a time of “isolationism” in the United States. Despite this isolationism, this period was marked by multiple U.S. military interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the expansion of an economic empire facilitated by the newly constructed Panama Canal. Dressed in her signature fruit headdress, Portuguese-born Brazilian Carmen Miranda performed Latin American songs and dances for an American audience. More affluent members of her audience could tour the region on United Fruit’s cruise ship freighters, learning from the company about the happy lives of the plantation workers there.

Typically, historians think of the end of World War II as marking the end of isolationism and the emergence of the U.S. as a global power. We talked about the elusive human rights moment at the end of the war: the formation of the United Nations and the idea of internationally recognized rights for all. DuBois delivered an address to the U.N. in 1947: “An Appeal to the World: A Statement of Denial of the Rights of Minorities,” asking the newly formed body to recognize and respond to injustices in the United States. In 1951, the UN High Conference on Refugees recognized international rights for refugees. These are still on the books, though they are rarely realized in the conduct of individual nations towards the world’s 65 million displaced persons.

We read Henry Luce’s very different declaration of insurgent American power at the end of the war, as well as Harry Truman admonishing the west to protect democracy by fighting the rise of “unfree,” communist world powers. Just as manifest destiny once explained the virtue and necessity of expansion west, anti-communism became the rallying point through which the U.S. mobilized incursions into decolonizing nations in Africa and Asia and continued its domination of the Western Hemisphere.

Our study of the global Cold War began by looking at the U.S. alliance with the newly independent Filipino regime in repressing the Hukbalahap uprising after World War II. Huk rebels had been key American allies in the fight against Japanese domination of the Philippines. But immediately after the war, President Ramon Magsaysay deemed them communist and worked to extinguish their claims for strong unions and equitable land distribution. Habits of empire prevailed, and the U.S. backed the suppression of the Huk rebels.

As anti-Huk operations in the Philippines suggest, Cold War practices were crucially shaped by previous habits of empire. Edward Lansdale developed his counterinsurgency theories in the Philippines and fell in love with a Filipina, Patrocinio (Pat) Yapcinco, who became his longtime mistress and later, his wife, there before bringing both to South Vietnam. We could start a lot of places and find these kinds of continuities and parallels. The Philippines is one place to look for imperial continuities: we also noted Ho Chi Minh’s presence at Versailles at the close of WWI, his eloquent pressure on Woodrow Wilson’s support for liberal internationalism and national sovereignty.

The State Department and the new Central Intelligence Agency understood the rise of anti-colonial movements in countries like Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Congo, Nicaragua, Angola, Honduras, and Vietnam as anti-American, both because they were potentially communist and because they threatened economic and political interests overseas. Cold War military engagements returned stateside, in the form of immigrants and refugees, increased surveillance and militarization, and even the names of subdivisions sold by real estate agents previously employed by the CIA.

The internationalism of the Cold War created both the infrastructure and ideological disposition of our current War on Terror. Iranians in 1979 remembered the US-backed overthrow of Mossadegh in ways few Americans were able to do at the time, courtesy of American exceptionalism. To many Iranians, US efforts on behalf of the ailing despot, Shah Reza Pahlavi, were contiguous with prior forms of intervention: deposing a democratically elected government, training the despised Savak, the Shah’s brutal intelligence agency.

To Americans watching the newly invented Nightline, with its nightly chronicle of national emergency, it appeared that Iranians – most often portrayed as an angry, Islamic, mob –had a baseless, almost dispositional hatred of the United States. As President George W. Bush explained it after the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001, “they hate our freedoms.” American TV watchers had little access to the long history of the region, so it appeared that the U.S. embassy in Tehran had fallen victim to fundamentalist mob rule, that Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda came out of nowhere, possessed of an inexplicable hatred of the west.

Cold War considerations, like the arming of anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan, have created the conditions for our current, seemingly endless War on Terror. American and Saudi funding to Pakistan during the Soviet war in Afghanistan nurtured and militarized the forces of Islamic fundamentalism, including nascent Al Qaeda. As Jeremy Scahill explains, these forces subsequently flourished during the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The continuity of U.S. empire, its militarization and seemingly endless reach, is one of the stories told in this class. Many of you commented on how overwhelming this continuity feels, and how difficult it seems to oppose it or even to find other historical threads.

Recently, when we listened to Stephen Kinzer talk about the history of U.S. intervention from the 19th century to the present, many of you took hopeful note of his discussion of Mark Twain and the Anti-Imperialist League. We studied the Anti-Imperialist League briefly, when we discussed the Spanish American War and beginnings of overseas empire. But, maybe because this course tilts towards the story of empire, many of you had forgotten it.

So Kinzer’s reading of Mark Twain as a fiery anti-imperialist, thundering against the moral and political implications of empire, stood out. We tend to understand Twain as a clever, playful fellow, rather than as an anti-imperialist thinker. Similarly, we learn about Henry David Thoreau and even read his “On Civil Disobedience” as an example of upstanding, solitary morality, rather than as a broad indictment of the Mexican-American War, which is how Thoreau meant it to be read.

I took your somewhat belated attention to the Anti-Imperialist League as a hunger for alternatives to empire, so I want to work towards a conclusion of this last lecture, and this class, that opens up some non- and anti-imperial possibilities. Just as the conduct of empire is an international proposition, it conjures and occasions alternative internationalisms. These alternative internationalisms hold out other possibilities for relations between nations and their inhabitants. They are not always ascendant, but they are persistent. We can think about the Anti-Imperialist League in this country; we can think about the Pan-Africanist Congress and its work against racism and colonialism. Revisiting Christina Heatherton’s “University of Radicalism,” we notice that resistance to empire is everywhere, even in the jails in which anti-imperialist radicals find themselves in company with other outlaws and dissidents.

Errands of U.S. empire have long occasioned mass protest. Domestic and soldier opposition to the Vietnam War hastened the U.S. exit from Saigon in 1975. Protesters the world over opposed both wars in Iraq as well as the ongoing bombings in Syria and Yemen. Responding to calls from Palestinian civil society, people around the world are taking part in the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement calling for an end to Israel’s American-backed occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.

We don’t have to look far to see resistance to empire. As we sit in class today, a caravan of migrants has made their way from the violence and poverty imposed in their Central American countries by decades of exploitation, starting with United Fruit and continuing through CIA-backed regime change under presidents from Truman through Trump. (At this very moment the U.S. backs a regime in Honduras that lost the popular vote in a recent election.). Migration is a form of resistance to the inequalities of historyMany in the United States have recognized the rights of migrants, working to shelter them against deportation through the Sanctuary Movement, which began during the 1980s and continues through the present day.

We can look to indigenous nations, who continue to resist settler-colonialism, after more than 500 years of it. Last year, a mobilization of indigenous nations of the Americas stood off the Dakota Access Pipeline for seven months, making the long fight of the Oceti Sakowin to protect their lands and waters visible the world over. Such fights to protect resources continue throughout the Americas. It is only the narrative of exceptionalism, of progress and benevolent improvement, that keep many of us from seeing these struggles.

I remember how surprised some of you were when we saw Colin Powell testifying to the United Nations about evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003, and I told you that I knew, and most of my friends did too, that he was lying. We went to war anyway, though I remember marching in the streets of Toledo, Ohio, where I was living at the time, with a crowd of recent Arab and Muslim immigrants who worried what the conflict might mean for their homelands. I do believe that it matters to know the truth, and that when more of us know the truth, we can prevail.

Opposition to empire has not always been successful, but it has been continuous. It matters that you know some of the history we talked about this semester, that you can recognize the language of exceptionalism when you hear it, that you can make your own choices about what is right and what is true.

Thank you for being open to talking about all of this, for being curious, for wanting to know stuff I had to cram over the weekend, and for always asking questions I could not quite answer. I have learned a lot from you this semester.

A new administrative hiring policy providing for “diversity” in administrative hiring that amplifies provisions for hiring non-academic chancellors (adopted, October 2017);

An ambitious re-structuring of the entire system that mandates the absorption of the two-year UW College institutions into four-year colleges and university campuses. (to be voted on at the Board of Regents meeting, November 2017)

These policies are part of a dangerous trend, in which traditional stakeholders in the university, such as communities, citizens, students, staff, and faculty, have less power than the Board of Regents and unelected UW system administration. Despite assurances that long-hallowed principles of shared governance would endure the changes wrought by Act 55 in 2015, these new policies are indication of dictatorial tendencies in the UW system and beyond.

These policies respond to initiatives proposed in the Wisconsin state legislature or, in the case of the administrative hiring policy, dispensed by the governor’s budget. To be clear: these policies do not respond to laws that have been democratically adopted by state governance. Instead, these policies anticipate the possibility of legislation that is or has been discussed in the statehouse. Essentially, this is rule by UW system administrators: a powerful and unelected “deep state” whose central function is to protect themselves, not to promote the well-being of taxpayers and/or students.

Characteristic of their creation outside of traditional governance channels, these policies were not vetted by stakeholders. For example: located in predominantly rural areas around the state, the UW colleges are crucial to fulfilling the Wisconsin Idea’s mandate of reaching every family in the state. Unlike the other campuses in the system, the UW Colleges are owned by their counties. But officials in counties most likely to be affected by the restructuring plan had no word of it before it was leaked to the press and then formally announced last week. Interviewed on WISN about the new plan, UW system President Ray Cross acknowledged that local communities and campuses were not consulted. Instead, UW system relied on the advice of “business leaders” and “research groups.”

Similarly, faculty senates received drafts of the “freedom of expression” and administrative hiring policies less than a week before the October Board of Regents meeting. They were invited to comment as individuals at a UW system website. Academic freedom is a principle so crucial to the University of Wisconsin that the policy quoted the Wisconsin Idea of “untrammeled inquiry” as justification for imposing harsher sanctions against political protest than sexual assault on campus . But, inconsistent with the very ideas of democratic inquiry it cited, this new policy passed with no time allotted for a broader vetting by governance, or by students, parents or other constituencies with an important stake in campus life.

Formulated in haste and outside of traditional channels, these policies are likely to be implemented haphazardly, possibly to the detriment of students. Planned for implementation starting in June, 2018, the restructuring of the UW system is being promoted for its economic efficiencies and benefits to students. No data has been forthcoming about what the economic or logistical outcomes of such a vast move will be. It’s likely, for example, that the restructuring will disrupt established connections between two-year and BA-granting institutions, making transferring and completing a degree more difficult for students. Having just completed a lengthy “regionalization” plan, these campuses will now be compelled to adapt to the new plan.

This kind of reshuffling creates turmoil and chaos within a large, vital state organization, costing taxpayer dollars in the short run. Without asking for a fair, impartial economic analysis, we have no way of knowing whether this will lead to savings in the long run. We can be assured that it will further centralize power in the state, at the expense of citizens, students, parents, and faculty.

In a compelling appeal to the Board of Regents, the UW Colleges Faculty Senate requests that the core principles of the Colleges be preserved, including the preservation of tenure and open access to “Nontraditional students, students from rural communities who want to remain at home to save money or help family; veterans who need local support; and students with caregiving and work responsibilities.” Will this measured and sensible approach be possible under the new plan? No one seems to know.

Evidence of haste and poor planning abounds. In the spring of 2017, UW system administrators commissioned an ambitious, $900,000 “Title and Total Compensation Study” from a private consulting firm, to be completed in 2019. How does the newly adopted administrative hiring policy fit into this expensive and not-yet completed picture? Not specified.

What is crystal clear about the administrative hiring policy is that it will allow the Board of Regents to hire university chancellors who do not have academic backgrounds. Without the benefit of even the diminished tenure protections now available in Wisconsin, these new administrators will be positioned to comply with directives from above, rather than promoting academic freedom or innovation on our campuses.

The accelerated pace, autocratic style and direction of current UW policies indicates that they are part of a much broader, national assault on public education and on democratic government. Although Governor Walker came to power promising Wisconsinites a relief from “big” federal government and more control at the local level, his appointed Board of Regents instead appropriates power away from citizens, students and communities. This direction contradicts the critical mission of public higher education as well as the very nature of the Wisconsin Idea.

What is at stake in American Exceptionalism, and what happens if we give it up?

We began this class by asking whether the United States could be considered an empire. This was a difficult question, and we had protracted debates. Some people wanted to resolve the issue by saying that the United States has done things that could be defined as imperial, but not in the same ways or for the same reasons as other empires. We read historian Jeremi Suri’s contention that U.S. support for “nation building” around the globe is and has been distinct from an imperial project. Of course, this position is definitive American exceptionalism, because it promotes the idea that U.S. wields power differently, somehow, than other nations did and do.

Justification for expansion and conquest goes back to Puritan invocations of the first testament in asserting their mission to make a “City on a Hill” as a beacon to the world. Reviewing American history from discovery and colonization to the founding of the republic, the push first West across the Mississippi and then across the Pacific Ocean, we began to work with empire as an analytic framework. This lens allowed us to compare episodes in national expansion: the colonization of North American Indian nations, the annexation of Hawai’i, the conquest of the Philippines.

Some of the students who most resisted the idea of the United States as an empire stopped coming to class around this time. I was sorry to lose them, because I think of the history classroom as a place to practice the democratic art of debate. But I also wondered whether they stopped coming to class as a way of protecting something of great importance to them.

At around this time in the semester, we were fortunate to have a classroom visit from historian Daniel Rodgers, who was on campus to deliver a public lecture. Rodgers writes that exceptionalism creates a bounded national identity, a sense of who is and who is not included. “It manufactures an artificially homogenous ‘we’ bounded off, by the sharpest of imagined contrasts, from a universalized ‘they’ in the world beyond[*].”[†] Letting go of exceptionalism, then, is challenging, because it means losing a particular idea about our identity.

Exceptionalist narratives of national identity are exclusive. They bound the nation and reinforce both geopolitical and social boundaries. As a result, some people have more access to the symbolic and actual goods of American exceptionalism than others. At the same time, these narratives create the moral certainty of national virtue.

A deep ambivalence runs through contemporary accounts of the initial period of overseas expansion at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Many commentators took up the “white man’s burden” as the mantle of world leadership inherited by the United States from Europe. An exceptionalist view of overseas expansion saw it as the logical extension of American “manifest destiny” to extend Christian civilization and the mission of the City on the Hill. The United States would be a different imperial power, one blessed with divine mission.

Other contemporary commentators debated the merits of acquiring lands and governing people outside the boundaries of the continental United States. For some, colonial acquisitions in the Caribbean and Pacific threatened to challenge American identity by bringing racially different populations under the flag. Often ignoring that the existence of the United States was founded on the conquest of Indian nations, others questioned whether a nation founded on a democratic ideal should rule territories acquired through military conquest. Both of these anti-imperialist positions were also exceptionalist: they held that the United States had a particular mission and identity in the world that might not be compatible with the practices of empire.

In this same historical moment, W.E.B. DuBois made his now famous connection between practices of inequality and segregation operative in the United States at the time and the inequalities perpetrated by empire. DuBois posed “the problem of the color line, not simply as a national and personal question but rather in its larger world aspect in time and space.” Recognizing that the goods of American exceptionalism were not equally distributed, DuBois noted that African Americans who built the nation were largely excluded from its benefits.

While he pinpointed the inequality prevailing in the United States – overseas territorial acquisitions commenced at a period of ascendant racial violence throughout the nation– DuBois did not limit his analysis to the necessity of Black inclusion in the American exceptionalist project. Instead, asserting the existence of a color line operative beyond the nation, DuBois was also among the creators of a key, internationalist alternative to exceptionalism. We noted his involvement in founding the first Pan-Africanist Congress of 1900. Pan Africanists viewed empire and white supremacy as global projects requiring a unified, international response.

As the United States became engaged in maintaining territorial dependencies as well as broad economic and political interests abroad, internationalist responses also multiplied. We read historian Christina Heatherton’s account of how the incarceration of Mexican anarchist revolutionary Ricardo Flores Magon at Leavenworth, Kansas occasioned the founding of a “university of radicalism” in the prison. In this international “convergence space,” suspected dissidents of a multitude of backgrounds and ideologies exchanged ideas and information: “Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, a container of dissent against racial capitalism and militarism, became a site through which the fluidity of the racial regimes within and across borders was made legible.” [‡]

The internationalism of the Pan Africanist Congress and the “university of radicalism” provided a counterpoint to exceptionalist narratives of U.S. expansion in the early twentieth century. As Spring Break approached, with its traditional Wisconsin snowstorm, one student asserted that the United States became far less international between the world wars, retreating into what many historians have described as a period of “isolationism.”

This insight about isolationism is part of a particular U.S. historical narrative. In this narrative, Americans grew tired of war and international engagement after both world wars, retreating instead into material and nation building concerns. This is an exceptionalist historical narrative, focusing on the particular progression of the nation with respect to the rest of the world.

I thought about the 1920s, often taught as a decade of prosperity and pleasure: Fordism and flappers. It is, of course, also a decade in which U.S. forces were deployed multiple times to the Caribbean, often remaining in countries like Nicaragua and Haiti for decades, installing and backing regimes friendly to national economic and political interests; a decade in which then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover commenced the negotiations that resulted in the Firestone Natural Rubber Corporation’s plantation in Liberia.

The fluorescence of consumer goods in the interwar period was very much a global enterprise. If bananas appear in Faulkner’s accounts of early twentieth century rural Mississippi, it’s because someone imported them. And when the United Fruit Company imported bananas, they also occupied countries, built infrastructure, suppressed labor unions and peasant uprisings, and propped up despotic regimes favorable to the U.S. “Fordism” as an American way of labor and life depended on cars, which ran on tires; the rubber for these tires came from Africa.

We have spent a lot of time since Spring Break – not that it has gotten much warmer since then, though at least there’s no snow on the ground, now that it’s May– exploring the international excursions that facilitate the free flow of bananas, oil, rubber, and other resources. Under the rubric of fighting communism, making the world safe for democracy, continuing the civilizing mission and protecting that City on the Hill, the United States has been relentlessly international, extending influence, culture and arms around the world. The development of the national security state brought the force of American exceptionalism to bear in Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, Congo, Chile, to name only a few.

We looked at the brief tenure of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected leader of Congo, in 1960. Products of internationalist collaboration and planning, the victory of the Congolese National Movement was part of a wave of decolonization movements in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. While justified in exceptionalist terms, the presence of the CIA in places like the Congo during the Cold War was part of an international, imperial pushback against these liberation movements.

(I want you to remember how difficult it was to find information about this movement; how the struggles of working men and women to take ownership of their lands, labor and country seem to have disappeared with the assassination and literal liquidation of Lumumba. There are parallel stories of struggle and even victory that are occluded by the exceptionalist frame. It’s important that certain narratives seem to crowd out, even extinguish, other ones.)

U.S. global endeavors continue to be explained and understood through the framework of American exceptionalism, from the “Cold War coups” we have spent time examining to the renewed emphasis on the War on Terror and making America democracy safe from the world. We are repeatedly told that this exceptionalism can make us safe in a dangerous world. Just as it did in the early 20th century, exceptionalism creates boundaries, making clear who belongs and who does not; recently issued executive orders banning refugees and enhancing federal deportation efforts are only one part of this. We are told that these things are necessary for our safety from terrorists and criminal “aliens”.

So what would happen if we gave up exceptionalism?

Rodgers writes: “The alternative to exceptionalist history begins with recognizing the immense amount of slippage in the real world between the categories of “here” and “elsewhere.” It requires not only dismantling the overgeneralized and overimagined rules of elsewhere but also realizing that the elsewhere is present at home.”

We read Andrew Friedman’s book, Covert Capital, which takes a distinctly non-exceptionalist approach. Friedman argues that the landscape of CIA office buildings and suburban domestic spaces developed in dialogue with the transnational military culture of Viet Minh Saigon. Premised on white supremacist practices of land tenure and segregation, these landscapes evolved transnationally, so that when the first wave of Viet Minh refugees arrived in Arlington, they took their place in a culture already familiar to them. The suburban landscape of northern Virginia was shaped by and shaping of empire.

During class presentations earlier this week, we learned of a fairly little known, early CIA effort: the overthrow of President Shukril al-Quwatli in Syria in 1949. (My vote for least known coup.) The United States opposed al-Quwatli because of his resistance to the construction of a pipeline from the oilfields of Saudi Arabia to the ports of Lebanon. After a bloodless coup, Al-Quwatli was jailed, ushering in an era of international intrigue and regime changes ultimately leading to the ascendance of Hafez Al-Assad, father of the current Syrian ruler Bashir Al-Assad.

So here is something we can learn from letting go of exceptionalism. The “bloodless coup” performed in service of oil pipelines is newly familiar to us in the U.S., in the wake of the clearing of Oceti Sakowin camp on Standing Rock reservation. We could say as Malcolm X did when John F. Kennedy was assassinated that this represents the chickens coming home to roost, as the national guard deployed militarized force against water protectors from all over the world; we could say it is history come full circle to return to the Dakota frontier. One of the lessons of Oceti Sakowin this past year is about global interconnection and the human need for water: in Flint, in South Dakota, in Somalia, in Ecuador: everywhere.

And this is what we get when we let go of exceptionalism: connection and shared history. And it is this shared history that can help us move forward. In the words of poet Aurora Levins Morales:

This time we’re tied at the ankles.
We cannot cross until we carry each other,
all of us refugees, all of us prophets.
No more taking turns on history’s wheel,
trying to collect old debts no-one can pay.
The sea will not open that way.

This time that country
is what we promise each other,
our rage pressed cheek to cheek
until tears flood the space between,
until there are no enemies left,
because this time no one will be left to drown
and all of us must be chosen.
This time it’s all of us or none.

Thank you for staying the course in this class and making it to this final lecture. Thank you for being an awesome class and being ready to debate and disagree and learn. This is, in part, what democracy looks like.

Rumors swirl about the current movement to adopt sanctuary campus policies in universities and K-12 schools. Emerging from immigrant rights and students of color organizations, the #SanctuaryCampus movement responds to threats made against immigrant and Muslim communities during the presidential campaign, and to the skyrocketing incidences of hate crimes since the election in early November. A majority of these hate crimes are taking place in schools and on university campuses.

This week, the UWM Faculty Senate will consider a Sanctuary Campus resolution. [Adopted unanimously 12/15/16.] Inspired by the work of the UWM student group, Young People’s Resistance Committee, on a petition that is currently circulating, a group of faculty collaborated to draft this resolution. The resolution asks the administration to affirm and enhance the campus’ guiding values on behalf of the many students, faculty and staff who are members of groups that have already been targeted for harassment and hate crimes and who fear they may be subject to repressive regulations, deportation, or forced registration: immigrants and international students, Muslims, Jews, LGBTQ people, people of color.

What is at stake here is nothing less than whether universities can continue to be places of public access to education and the exchange of ideas. The #SanctuaryCampus movement recognizes that the mounting climate of intolerance and divisiveness impedes open access to work and study. At the same time that we have witnessed assaults on academic freedom affecting research and teaching at UWM, many of our students and colleagues are becoming vulnerable to repression and harassment. Further, we acknowledge that these impediments may well increase in the coming months and years. Recognizing that it is difficult to predict the future, we nonetheless call upon our administration to respond to the current climate of fear and division by becoming preemptive and proactive in our collective defense.

The Sanctuary Campus resolution seeks support for undocumented students, some of whom who may face loss of access to DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) status, those who may have more trouble negotiating visas and international travel, those who may face harassment on or off campus. Further, we call on the campus administration to direct UWM police to decline to assist with immigration raids.

The administration fears that adopting a Sanctuary Campus policy might compel them to violate federal immigration law. In fact, it does not: the resolution acknowledges that in the case that the Department of Homeland Security or other federal agency presents a legal warrant, campus police are compelled by law to cooperate with them. Declaring our campus a “sanctuary campus” communicates the message that our campus prioritizes the well-being of students, staff and faculty, and plans to do everything within its powers to protect their rights as such.

The idea of a “sanctuary campus” emanates from the Sanctuary Movement, a faith-based movement that sheltered refugees from the “Dirty Wars” in Central America in the 1980s. In 1982 Milwaukee became the first Catholic Archdiocese to embrace this movement, which eventually took root in Protestant and Jewish congregations as well. The Sanctuary Movement took inspiration from “Cities of Refuge” in the Old Testament, in which individuals pursued for crimes committed in error could find refuge, justice and even forgiveness. Those taking part in the Sanctuary Movement risked violating some aspects of federal law because they felt that their faith called them to protect the vulnerable. Though it does not call for violating the law, #SanctuaryCampus responds to a similar urgency.

In the past decade, a New Sanctuary Movement has once again emerged from faith based communities. Starting in 2006 with the well-publicized case of Elvira Arellano, who took sanctuary in a Chicago church until she was arrested and deported, the New Sanctuary Movement offers support and solidarity to the thousands of people faced with the reality of deportation. In Milwaukee, Muslim, Jewish and Christian congregations participate in the New Sanctuary Movement, which holds monthly services as well as vigils in front of the local Immigration Customs Enforcement agency.

A Sanctuary City movement has swept the country.Close to fifty cities around the nation have joined this movement, declining to sign up for the federal 287(g) program, which asks local police to enforce federal immigration laws. Both the city and the county of Milwaukee have ratified sanctuary policies.

Like the word “amnesty,” “sanctuary” has become a charged term, partly because of the success of the Sanctuary Movement. Politicians like president-elect Donald Trump and Milwaukee County sheriff Dave Clark claim that to provide sanctuary is to encourage and to shelter crime. Allegations like these foster fears that creating a sanctuary campus may invite political retribution. In Georgia, one state legislator responded to an attempt to create a sanctuary campus at Emory University by threatening to pass an anti-sanctuary bill defunding the campus of state revenues. These threats enhance fears on and off campus. But an attempt to pass an “Anti-Sanctuary Cities” bill failed in Wisconsin last year. And even if such a policy were to revive and succeed, the campus would have sufficient time to adjust any policies deemed out of line.

Clearly, as a public institution, the state university system of Wisconsin cannot establish as its official policy the violation of state and federal law. We can, however, make it the position of our campus that all are welcome here; we can also make it clear that peaceful civil disobedience in pursuit of personal security and social justice is not inimical to our work. By protecting our collective rights to education, #SanctuaryCampus ensures that the boundaries of the university continue to embrace the entire state, thereby realizing the Wisconsin Idea.

It’s a refrain in the endless attack on education: ‘no one deserves a job for life.’ The phrase is meant to convey outrage against the tenure system. It summons images of feckless educators goofing off on the public’s dime, job security making us deaf to the injured cries of our students and rebukes from school administrators alike.

Implying that good work can only be motivated by fear, this view promotes a dim view of human nature. Such poorly documented negativity is contradicted by abundant evidence that people with job security put in hours of their own time to do the job well.

So let’s entertain the opposite idea for a moment. Let’s say that job security is widely productive, that everyone deserves a job for life. Everyone should have the opportunity for meaningful work with a reasonable degree of security.

Everyone deserves a job for life. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights included “just and favorable” conditions at work and protection against unemployment as basic human rights. This visionary document also asserted broad access to education as a fundamental component of what it called “the dignity and worth of the human person.”

Job security does not make employees less likely to work hard. To have job security is to have a sense of ongoing possibility at work. This possibility breeds investment, not slacking. Creativity emerges from employees having a stake in our place of employment; enterprise arises from our dreams of a future.

Ask any educator when she started planning for the school year and you’ll hear about plenty of time spent off the clock during the summer months. Such unpaid labor is not extracted by coercive metrics of assessment, by high-stakes testing. It emerges out of reflection about the past year, from hopes of doing it better. These ambitions make labor meaningful.

Asserting the importance of job security is not equivalent to saying that everyone deserves a job no matter what. Like any other labor arrangement, the tenure system includes processes for dismissal and for employee grievance. Further, as I have argued elsewhere about staff responses to imposed austerity in Wisconsin, employees who are invested in their workplace want to work hard to ensure its success, even in difficult times (see my “Skeleton Crew: Or, Adventures in Austerity Math”).

When politicians talk about “education for job readiness” do they really mean to call for the creation of a disposable labor force? Visions of a collective stable and prosperous future implicitly include job security. No one dreams of a work life continually ruptured by downsizing and restructuring for themselves or for their children. But this is, increasingly, what is available.

As Ben Casselman points out, when people today wax nostalgic about the stable employment of the mid-twentieth century − the “good manufacturing jobs” touted by so many politicians −what they are really longing for is the security that resulted from a long history of labor organizing. Since this much-touted heyday of American manufacturing, unions have been purposely eviscerated and blamed for economic downturns. The job security vouchsafed by the labor movement is blamed for the loss of stable employment. In reality, job loss has been caused by enforced austerity in the funding of public institutions and by corporate choices to restructure and/or move operations overseas, away from labor protections like job security.

Currently, to mention teachers’ unions in a conversation about education is to risk being barraged by largely unsubstantiated fables of “dead wood:” horror stories about entitled teachers taking advantage of easy and stable jobs at the expense of our children. Such cautionary tales blame educator job security for current problems in our education system.

The attack on tenure has been part of a broad assault on public support for education, K-PhD. Animosity towards educators leads to the concentration of power in the hands of management. This is evident in the move to “take over” Milwaukee Public Schools, transferring control away from teachers, students, and parents to an unelected board. At the same time, despite imposed fiscal austerity, the amount spent on administration in higher education continues to increase exponentially.

Administrative power increases as job security declines. Management in every sector, education included, prefers flexible, meaning disposable, labor. The broad access to job security and education envisioned by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights comes to seem like a long-gone fantasy. As is becoming dramatically evident at Long Island University and elsewhere, educators are easily replaced, even if our skills, commitment, and knowledge are not.

Workers can always be replaced: we learn that again and again as “flexible” policies are used to deracinate public institutions and eliminate experienced workers. But the stability and vision created by longstanding systems of job security are not replaceable. There will always be people to do the job, though increasingly, we do them in circumstances that undermine us.

Everyone deserves a job for life. All workers deserve job security. More broadly, we all benefit from stable institutions and educators inspired to work hard for our collective future.

Or, Adventures in Austerity Math

I learned last week that another colleague is retiring. Like others who left before her, this colleague holds down an ample share of our collective work. She teaches popular courses in more than one area and mentors many graduate students. She is a reliable voice in History Department meetings and committee work. Having spent most of her career at UWM, she understands the intricacies of the institution. The loss of her professional savvy and institutional memory −what we might call her knowledge capital− will be substantial.

In normal times, we would go about the process of filling the gap left by such departures. The department would conduct a national search, at the end of which we would hire a historian who could begin to fill the shoes of the senior colleague. While lacking the experience and institutional memory of the person retiring, the new colleague would bring fresh historical perspectives and methods and, over the seven years before coming up for tenure, would hopefully become a vital part of the community of scholars that makes up a university department.

But these are not normal times. Over the past five years, as colleagues have retired or left for other jobs, they have not been replaced. That means there are whole swaths of the globe, entire historical epochs, for which we have no historian at UWM. Before this year, the department was able to hire part-time, contingent faculty to cover some of these areas.

With the recent round of cuts imposed by the legislature, we cannot afford to hire even poorly paid contingent faculty to cover the widening gaps in our curriculum. What we have then, in many if not most departments, constitutes a skeleton crew: a reduced group of us still staffing the institution, trying to make sure that courses get taught so that students can get educated, complete their programs, and graduate.

What does it mean that my department, like many others at UWM and around the UW system, increasingly lacks the personnel to cover key areas? Does it mean that popular courses, like those on the history of the Middle East once taught by a colleague who departed for greener pastures three years ago, will go untaught?

Of course not. It means that we will work harder, teach more, develop unfamiliar classes. Surely this is one of the meanings of “flexibility” as repeatedly intoned by UW President Ray Cross and the Board of Regents: we are stretching, becoming more limber, reaching far out of our fields of expertise and comfort zones to make sure our students get the courses they need. What could be wrong with that?

In 2012, after Act 10 and a punishing round of budget cuts to already strapped K-12 Milwaukee Public Schools, I remember hearing how few adults would now be present at any given time at my daughter’s K-8 school.In an emergency, increased class sizes along with layoffs of teachers and professional staff could easily translate to mayhem, with far too few adults attempting to herd crowds of rowdy and/or terrified kids to safety.

That image stuck with me. It’s a good way to envision the role of public employees during a time of crisis-level austerity. We are besieged by assaults on the institutions we serve; we work hard, against nearly impossible odds, to keep our charges safe.

So of course we will step up, my colleagues and I. We will be flexible, crafty and ingenious; we will do more with less knowledge capital. Despite the fact that our salaries already lag well behind those at peer institutions, we will take on the additional work necessary teach regions and eras for which we lack preparation and/or the language skills to read the pertinent literature and primary sources. And if I know UWM students, they will tolerate this with their characteristic grace and good humor.

But there is a big problem with the skeleton crew approach. UWM’s dual mission of access and research is not an either or proposition. The point of having an urban access campus is to make Research 1-quality facilities widely available to students in Milwaukee and beyond. That is UWM’s specific role in fulfilling the Wisconsin Idea.

I recently found myself explaining the research university to an incoming PhD student. I told him how scholarly research finds context in the university classroom. I bring my research expertise into the classroom, but I am also listening to my students to see whether what I am saying makes sense to them. Listening to students, in turn, changes how I conduct my scholarly work. When it comes to educating all of us − undergraduates, graduate students and faculty −the system works remarkably well at circulating and increasing knowledge capital.

The skeleton crew is a bad deal for faculty, who now must take on additional and uncompensated labor keeping the university going. But it’s even worse for our students. It’s not that they won’t get the best that we can give them. It’s just that we are now unable to give them what they signed up for: a research 1-level, public education. Running the university with a skeleton crew means less knowledge capital to go around. And that cheats our students.

UWM students deserve the best that a fine research university like UWM has to offer; they deserve to get the courses they need when they need them, so that they don’t have to spend costly additional semesters completing their educational programs.

So how do we exit the crisis? How can we put a little meat on the bones of the skeleton crew?

The answer is quite simple. It relates to the budget that the Board of Regents will discuss this week, to the tuition freeze that Governor Walker brags about, and, most importantly, to the upcoming biennial budget for the state of Wisconsin. We must increase state investment in the UW System, funding the freeze so that students get what they pay for. Until this takes place, we will be running with a skeleton crew.